Thursday, July 21, 2016

The digital political campaign gets personal - The Boston Globe

Final sentence: "And I’ll know that marketers really understand me when I turn on the TV in an election year and see no political ads at all."

"Data brokers strip out your name, address, and other traditional identifiers before they sell these profiles. But marketers can still match that data against the information they’ve collected from your tracking cookie to create a rich, detailed portrait of your life. So they may not know your name, but through your browsing history, buying habits, and other bread crumbs, they can make a pretty educated guess about which ads to show you.

The tactics are little different from those used by companies to peddle their products, but their application to American politics dismays Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an Internet activist group.

“You’re talking about the creation of political dossiers on individuals,” he said. “It’s time the alarm bells sounded.”"